PREFACE.
If any one of those mysterious autocrats who “do” the reviews “on” some newspaper or serial shall, in his condescension, deign to inform public opinion what he may think aboutMirth and Metre, that autocrat, unless he be in an unhoped-for state of benignity, will, doubtless, commence with the agreeable remark that “the work before us consists of certain Lays and Legends, written in paltry imitation of the productions of theinimitable Thomas Ingoldsby.”
Admitting the imputation without cavil, (except at the word “paltry,” whichreallyis too bad, don’t you think so, dear reader?) the authors would inquire whether such an admission legitimately exposes them to hostile criticism? When the late Mr. Barham produced the “Ingoldsby Legends,” he, as it were, founded a new school of comic versification. That this is not a mereipse dixitof our own is evinced by the fact that, in common parlance, a man who adopts this style of composition is said to have written an “Ingoldsby,” as he might be said to have written an Epic, had he chosen that form instead.
To assert that only a very small shred of Mr. Barham’s mantle has fallen upon any of his imitators (a fact to which none will more readily assent than the present writers), is simply to state that the standard we have proposed to ourselves is a high one, and proportionately difficult to attain.
“Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona”
“Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona”
“Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona”
“Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona”
is a fact which does not appear to have checked the energies or paralysed the ambition of the “king of men;” nor was Waterloo the less a great victory because Julius Cæsar had a few centuries before successfully invaded Gaul.
To our thinking, however, the common sense of the matter lies (after the usual fashion of that inestimable quality) in a nutshell. A servile copy of any particular style—a hash of old ideas, or want of ideas, served up after the manner of some popular writer—is a bad thing, against which all true lovers of literature are bound to raise their voices whenever they meet with it; but if a young author, imbued with admiration of, and respect for, some man of genius who has lived before him, sees fit to embody his own thoughts and feelings in a form which experience has approved, rather than confuse himself and his readers, in his frantic strivings after originality, by torturing words out of their natural meaning, and marshalling them in a metre against which the ear rebels, we conceive no just canon of criticism can forbid his doing so. To which of these categories the Lays and Legends in this Volume are to be assigned, we leave it to our readers to determine.
Frank E. Smedley.Edmund H. Yates.